Happy Birthday, America. The 4th of July falling on a Wednesday gives me an extra day of sorting. This morning I’m working on finishing up a couple team trades (Rockies and Red Sox).
Yesterday, Cards From The Attic tweeted a question to his followers asking how many cards were in their collections. I responded with “about 2 million,” and showed a few pictures.
The pictures are a bit outdated because it seems as though I’m adding thousands of cards by the week. So, I said I would show a video of the card room, card closet, and “overflow” room.
My monster collection is only about three years in the making. I’ve collected cards since the late 1980’s, and sold off most of them at various times.
When I moved to Madison four years ago the collecting bug caught on and stuck. New town, no friends, and for the first time in my adult life I had a job that allowed nights and weekends. So, I regained my hobby love. It started by weekly trips to Target to buy blasters, and a couple months later I bought my first Craigslist lot.
Still, my collection numbered about 100,000 at that time.
Over the next couple years I found more and more Craigslist lots. Our last house had a large unfinished basement. It was an okay area to pile all of my cards. But, it was dark and not appealing to spend time down there. It also had a concrete floor so sorting had to be done on a table.
Then my wife and I began building a house. We had builders (I struggle putting together a book shelf). I had to move all those cards. At the time it was probably 500,000 or 600,000.
And in our new house I had a finished basement complete with my own card room. My dream!
Initially my collection fit nice and neat in th card room.
But then I added more and more and more cards. In the past two years I’ve added over a million and I would estimate my collection is very close to two million, maybe more.
What does two million cards look like? Well, they certainly don’t fit nice and neat in my card room. Nor do they fit nice and neatly in the neighboring walk-in closet. And they have started to overflow in another unfinished storage area. Here’s what it looks like.